A Commitment to Excellence

The Long Run of Doris Brown Heritage

As a young girl, Doris Severtson liked nothing better than to run freely along the beach in front of her family home in Gig Harbor, WA, or through the woods nearby. It wasn’t training or racing, just running for the simple joy of movement and the love of her surroundings. No one would question the need for a child to be active like that, though soon enough Severtson came into contact with doubters, and with more substantial barriers to her love of running.

When she first began competing in the summer of 1958, at the age of 15, Severtson ran for the same reasons as before. But a year later, as a member of Tacoma’s small Mic Mac club, she set a national 440-yard dash record and her running career, and her life, quickly changed.

Since that first record Doris Brown Heritage (née Severtson) has been on a journey across incredibly varied terrain, one more undulating than the toughest cross country course she ever ran. The journey included national and world records, international championships, coaching and administrative assignments all over the globe, and opportunities to compete and work with people who became her closest friends. There were also bitter disappointments, brought on by injury and misfortune. And for a long while there was the frustrating reality that women had scant opportunity to race at the distances best suited to Brown Heritage. Some said women should not run at all, but because of Brown Heritage and others from her era, those voices have been silenced. Through it all Brown Heritage has worked tirelessly, promoting the sport she loved long before she even knew it was a sport.

Shortly after her 440-yard record, Brown Heritage became aware that a women’s 800 meter event was being added to the 1960 Rome Olympics schedule. Back in the 1928 Games in Amsterdam, women had first competed in five track & field events, but upon completion of the 800, a debate ensued about whether women should perform what some doctors labeled "feats of endurance." They warned that women running the 800 would "become old too soon," and ultimately the International Amateur Athletic Federation (IAAF) banned women from racing beyond 200 meters. For 32 years half a lap was the farthest women could run in the Olympics.

Although a novice, Brown Heritage believed she could make the U.S. team in the 800, and as a high school senior she set out to do just that. She was a legitimate contender, given her ability in the 440 and the fact that few American women had experience at the distance. At the 1960 U.S. Olympic Trials, Brown Heritage finished third in the 800, an event won by another talented 17-year-old, Billie Pat Daniels. Unfortunately none of the U.S. top three ran fast enough to meet the automatic Olympic qualifying standard, meaning that only Daniels could travel to Rome as the sole entrant each nation was guaranteed.

That fall Brown Heritage entered Seattle Pacific College (now University), a small Methodist institution founded in 1891 as Seattle Seminary. She intended to continue running but the school had no women’s track team—only a handful in the U.S. did at the time—so Brown Heritage talked with the men’s coach and began training with his runners. "I tried to do their workouts and really didn’t run so well during that time," she recalls. It wasn’t a case of too many miles but rather that Brown Heritage was running all-out nearly every day while leading an incredibly active life, even for a college student. "It never occurred to me," she admits now, "that working two jobs, and being in band and orchestra, and trying to be a student was a little much."

A different approach was needed, at least for her running, and fortunately Brown Heritage soon teamed up with Dr. Ken Foreman, who had coached Seattle Pacific’s fledgling men’s track & field program from 1950 to 1957. During that time Foreman also founded the Falcon Track Club, a team open to area girls and women, but he then left Seattle for three years to complete a doctorate at the University of Southern California. Foreman resumed coaching both teams in 1962, and the Falcon Track Club soon blossomed into a powerful national presence.

Although he had coached women, Foreman had no experience with a female athlete of Brown Heritage’s caliber. "We were both kind of naïve," he admits. "My professional training as a sports scientist led me to believe that women just simply wouldn’t hold up, but Doris taught me she could do anything the men did."

Working harder than ever, Brown Heritage continued to run the 800 but was slow to improve. Also troubling were the people who could not understand why a woman would want to run. "Guys would throw footballs at me or push me in the lake," she recalls, "and I’d come home and say ‘I’m never running again,’ but the next day I’d say ‘Oh, that wasn’t such a big deal.’" Brown Heritage graduated from Seattle Pacific in the spring of 1964 with a bachelor’s degree in physical education and taught physical education at area junior high schools until joining the faculty at her alma mater in 1967.

A broken foot kept Brown Heritage off the 1964 Olympic Team, yet she was hardly demoralized; in fact, she was poised on the brink of greatness. That winter she and Foreman continued to fine-tune her training, and then Brown Heritage began running daily in the morning. "I heard Jim Ryun was running twice a day," she recalls, "and I thought ‘Oh, that sounds good.’ Right from the beginning it really worked for me; even my hundred meter time improved." But more than that, the morning runs were spiritually rewarding for Brown Heritage. "My philosophy became that what you do in the morning is for yourself as a human being, and what you do in the afternoon is as an athlete," she says. "For me, the morning isn’t so much training as a time to plan the day and be worshipful."

Afternoon sessions were incredibly demanding, but Brown Heritage was equal to the task. "She just changed our whole sense of what girls and women were about," says Foreman. "I mean, anyone who could run 20x220 in 32 seconds or back-to-back 600’s in 1:30 is pretty tough. The measurable factors would not have classified Doris as a world champion, so there had to be something else," Foreman concludes. "I think that something else is in the quality of her life, in the steam that drives her machine. She was a fierce competitor, she was not afraid of pain, and she never asked ‘Is there one more?’ She was always absolutely committed to excellence."

The additional miles and ever-harder training bore fruit in early 1966 at an indoor mile in British Columbia. Canadian national champion Roberta Picco was favored, but Foreman had confidence. "Our plan was to take the lead in the ninth of 11 laps and hold on," he recalls, "but Doris passed Picco in lap seven and I’m screaming at her ‘Too soon! Too soon!’" Brown Heritage more than held on: her 4:52 established a new indoor world record and was the first-ever sub-5:00 indoor mile by a woman. "That race, to me, was really the benchmark of her career," says Foreman.

A fortuitous development for Brown Heritage was the staging in 1967 of the first women’s international cross country championship, held on a cold and windy March afternoon outside the coastal Welsh town of Barry. After touring a three-mile course through muddy athletic fields and cow pastures, Brown Heritage entered the quarter mile homestretch all alone. The best European harriers were nearly 200 meters back when Brown Heritage crossed the finish line, the first of a record five consecutive victories in the event.

"To win that, because it was the first world championship for women, was a pretty awesome experience," Brown Heritage says. "I remember the feeling—I can see it and taste it and smell it—but I don’t know how to put it into words." More than her own victory, Brown Heritage valued the entire experience and what the event held for the future of women’s distance running. "I had a feeling," she recalls, "that my winning would make a difference to the AAU [Amateur Athletic Union], that maybe the U.S. women would get to have a team the next year." Indeed, in 1968 the AAU did send a women’s team to the meet. Brown Heritage won again and Falcon teammate Vicki Foltz finished second, and the U.S. defeated England by a single point. The downside was that everyone had to pay their own way to the competition; the level playing field hadn’t been conceived just yet.

From 1967 onward cross country was Brown Heritage’s training focus. She and Foreman had become an efficient and formidable team, and the work Brown Heritage put in dumbfounded most of her contemporaries, male and female alike. "Once," recalls Foreman, "we were riding in a bus with Gaston Roelants and Mohammed Gammoudi (both world cross country champions), and they were blown away to hear she had run 125 miles the week before. Even they weren’t doing that much."

But the longest women’s track distance at the 1968 Olympics remained 800 meters, and a battery of predictive testing Foreman conducted with Brown Heritage that summer suggested the 800 was just too short. Naturally Brown Heritage believed otherwise, and she got through the heats in Mexico City with relative ease. But in the final it was Madeline Manning who took gold with a world record-tying 2:00.9. Brown Heritage finished in a pack and had to settle for fifth, her 2:03.9 an outstanding mark nonetheless.

While Brown Heritage was in Mexico City, Olympic cross country skier Trina Hosmer arrived in Seattle and began training with the Falcons. "Everything then was ‘Doris, Doris’," recalls Hosmer, "but when she came back I found out she was just an ordinary person. She never wanted to talk about herself, only about what you had done. That, to me, is a great athlete." Hosmer and Foltz were integral members of the Falcons during the late-60’s and early-70’s, the team’s greatest years of track and cross country dominance, and Brown Heritage was virtually unbeatable during this period.

But in March of 1972 Brown Heritage’s string of five world cross country titles ended, though not because she lost a race. After a routine victory in the national championships Brown Heritage was defeated by scheduling ineptness on the part of the AAU, which lined up an indoor track dual with the Soviet team in Virginia the same day the cross country race was to take place in England. Not even Brown Heritage could figure out a way to be both places at once, and as national indoor mile champion she was tabbed to run on the track rather than over her beloved hill and dale.

Brown Heritage had raced extremely well in 1971, setting world records at 3,000 meters and two miles and capturing the 800 meter silver medal at the Pan-American Games. So as the 1972 Munich Olympics approached she was determined to improve on her fifth at Mexico City. Bolstering Brown Heritage’s hopes was the fact that the Olympic schedule would include a women’s 1,500 meters, an event in which she had ranked seventh in the world for 1971 despite few opportunities to race the distance. So Brown Heritage was upbeat as she and Foreman completed the final weeks of preparation and headed for Germany.

All was well as Brown Heritage readied herself prior to her first heat in Munich, but the unthinkable happened when the eight competitors began leaving the warm-up track. "I left before she did," recalls Foreman, "and was up at the top of the Olympic Stadium when the 1,500 meter runners walked in, and she was not there. Of course I went nuts, wondering what had happened to her." Arriving back at the warm-up track it was a while before Foreman located Brown Heritage, who had already been put in a cast by German doctors. She had inadvertently stepped on a section of protruding track curbing, badly tearing the peroneal tendon in her ankle. The injury would heal imperfectly, a factor in Brown Heritage’s subsequent shift of emphasis from elite competition to coaching.

Another event that made 1972 a turning point for Brown Heritage was passage of Title IX of the Educational Amendments of 1972, the landmark legislation banning sex discrimination in the schools. Title IX had direct application to intercollegiate athletics and opened the way for women to participate in collegiate sports. Soon after the legislation went into effect, Seattle Pacific began gearing up to offer varsity programs for women. Track & field was initiated in 1975 and cross country followed the next year. Foreman headed up both programs at first with Brown Heritage assisting, but in 1979 she took over cross country duties for both the men’s and women’s teams. Success was immediate for the SPU women, no surprise given the outstanding record of the Falcon Track Club. Over the years SPU has placed highly at many AIAW and NCAA championship meets, produced dozens of All-Americans and individual national champions, and even a few Olympians.

Coaching and teaching gradually consumed more of Brown Heritage’s energy and attention, but she continued to train and compete when possible. And while there were few big track victories after Munich, she remained one of the world’s finest cross country runners for several more years.

Brown Heritage also tried the marathon, but she never had an opportunity to run the 26.2 mile distance under anything close to ideal circumstances. Her first, run on a whim in May of 1976, was actually her fastest. Several SPU athletes had decided to go to the Vancouver International Marathon the day after graduation, and Brown Heritage went along. She not only won the race with ease but her 2:47.35 was the fastest-ever female debut and only nine minutes above the world record.

With the ability to run 20 mile training runs in two hours, Brown Heritage was clearly capable of running a marathon in the mid-2:30’s, perhaps faster. At the 1976 New York City Marathon she placed second to Miki Gorman, and while her time of 2:53 was disappointing, she only laughs about it today. "I learned you don’t go to a marathon after coaching intramurals and getting on a plane in the evening to fly to New York, losing three hours, and then getting on the bus at 5:00 in the morning," she says.

Over the last quarter-century Brown Heritage has not only continued to coach and teach at Seattle Pacific, but has also taken on numerous national and international assignments. She was selected to serve on the U.S. coaching staff for the 1984 and 1988 Olympic Games, the 1987 and 1990 World Track & Field Championships, and was head coach for several World Cross Country teams. In 1988 Brown Heritage became the first woman elected to the IAAF’s Cross Country and Road Race Committee. Most recent among her many honors was induction into the National Distance Running Hall of Fame in July.

Yet Brown Heritage’s heart has always remained at Seattle Pacific, and former and current SPU runners echo each other when speaking about her coaching abilities. "I’ve never had a coach who cares so deeply about her athletes as people, and is still absolutely uncompromising about excellence," says Matt Cooper, who ran at SPU in the mid-90’s. "Just one conversation with her would make you feel better about a bad race and give you a desire to get back out there."

Brown Heritage may never have asked "Is there one more?" but, according to 1998 SPU grad Erika Daligcon, she urges her athletes and students to regularly ask themselves "What’s one more thing you can do?" "That’s something I’ve taken with me in life," says Daligcon. It is this sort of searching quality, a desire to go beyond the mundane and merely acceptable and reach for excellence, that has always defined Brown Heritage as an athlete, coach and administrator. And she continues to light the way for women distance runners, and many others.

"Doris Brown Heritage has done it all in the sport of track and field," notes USATF Executive Director Craig Masback. "While we live in a world that throws around plaudits too easily and uses the word ‘pioneer’ too routinely, I can’t say enough about the contribution Doris Brown Heritage, a true pioneer, has made to our sport."

Brown Heritage turned 60 this September, just as she was beginning a new cross country season at SPU. Though she hasn’t competed seriously in years, Brown Heritage still runs with close friends nearly every day, loving the sport just as she has since childhood. "Even today," says Foreman, "she’ll hang around after she’s taught and coached, waiting for her friends to show up, and they’ll go off running, laughing joyously down the street."